Apes, the elephant and the OHPA

By Paul Cantor

Published
10:31 am EDT, Friday, May 20, 2016

Cranbury and Oak Hills parks belong to all the citizens of Norwalk. Therefore, they should serve the interests of all the citizens of Norwalk. Yet special interest politics and/or misconceptions about the purpose of municipal parks have led some of our elected officials to go bananas in an effort to turn them over to a minority of well-heeled taxpayers.

Cranbury Park is Norwalk’s largest park. It is the one place in the city where residents can realize the value of nature left undisturbed. Yet a tiny minority wants to induce a private sector firm, Go Ape, to set up a tree top adventure course in the park. And a key selling point of the course, in the view of this minority, is that it will generate income for the city. No matter that the course would disturb those who visit Cranbury because it is the only place in Norwalk where they can enjoy a long undisturbed peaceful walk in the woods. And no matter that municipal parks aren’t supposed to generate revenue.

Rather, the purpose of municipal parks, in the words of Wikipedia, is “to offer recreation and green space to residents of, and visitors to, the municipality.” Of course, if a children’s carousel or miniature golf course or concession stand is located in a park and run by city employees, then their patrons might be charged a fee to cover their costs. Alternatively, their construction and operation might be contracted out.

But the criteria for determining the benefits of allocating space in municipal parks for one recreational activity or another should have nothing to do with the capacity of the activity to generate income. Instead the criteria should have to do with its capacity to contribute to the parks’ ability to make healthy, enjoyable and environmentally friendly open-air recreation readily available to all of a city’s residents.

A tree top adventure run by Go Ape, a for-profit enterprise, is something that residents who can afford it may enjoy once or twice. Furthermore, to the extent it induces people from surrounding communities to visit Cranbury Park it may add to Go Ape’s bottom line. But the amount of money Go Ape will contribute to the city’s coffers in the form of lease payments or shared revenue as a result is likely to be miniscule.

Meanwhile, as out-of-towners looking for the latest thrill flock to the park, home prices and the tax revenue tied to them are likely to plummet. And in the process Norwalk will increasingly come to be seen as a city that aspires to be Disneyland with a taxpayer subsidized 18-hole golf course.

Of course the golf course which takes up nearly all the land in Oak Hills, Norwalk’s only other major park, was never supposed to require taxpayer subsidies. Rather the Oak Hills Park Authority (OHPA) was set up to manage the golf course so that user fees would cover its costs. But because of the well-documented decrease in the demand to play 18-holes of golf (the elephant in the room that the OHPA and its supporters refuse to acknowledge) user fees have not been able to cover its costs.

Consequently, at a time when the city and the state are responding to a budget crisis by cutting back spending on education and other services, our elected officials have provided the Oak Hills Park Authority with millions of dollars in “loans” that have had to be restructured and ultimately are likely to be forgiven along with a $1.5 million grant that the authority plans to use to upgrade cart paths and make other improvements to the course.

From the point of view of taxpayers as a whole, however, that money should be used to turn Oak Hills Park into the one thing Norwalk sorely lacks — a multi-use park near the center of its city.

Most taxpayers aren’t aware of what is taking place. So those officials see it as in their interest to pander to the well-organized special interest group of golfers that the OHPA represents.

Consequently, with the support of members of the Common Council and the Mayor, the authority plans to spend most of the grant it has received from taxpayers on a golf course that benefits a few at the expense of the many.

Meanwhile the authority is seeking to have millions of dollars in loans it has been granted by taxpayers forgiven. Yet even if the loans are forgiven it admits that without an outside source of revenue it will never be able to cover its costs.

Hence, it paid the National Golf Foundation $20,000 for a study to support its contention that if taxpayers would loan it an additional $4 million to construct a driving range, the driving range would provide it with the additional revenue it needed to cover its expenses.

Unfortunately for the authority, however, the National Golf Foundation study concluded that the driving range might not even cover the cost of its own construction.

So the OHPA now maintains that by marketing itself to golfers in Norwalk’s wealthier surrounding communities it will generate the money it needs to cover its costs.

In short, despite the elephant in the room, the authority continues to view itself as a potentially profitable business. But if it is a business, it is a business that is losing money even though it operates on tax-free land in a public park with taxpayer subsidized loans and grants.

And once again, the purpose of our public parks is not to provide space for a business and especially a business whose purpose is to market itself to wealthy golfers from surrounding communities in order to generate the income needed to sustain an 18-hole golf course that serves the interest of a minority of Norwalk taxpayers at the expense of all the other residents of the city.